Rating: 7.4/10. Novel of Norwegian literature, won the Nobel Prize in 1920; it tells the story of a homesteader named Isak in Northern Norway around 1850. The narrative begins with Isak settling in an untouched wilderness, far from any other settlement, where he starts building a home from scratch. Shortly after, his wife, Inger, arrives…
Author: Bai Li
China’s Cosmopolitan Empire: The Tang Dynasty by Mark Edward Lewis
Rating: 7.5/10. An academic history book about everything you wanted to know about the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), considered one of the Chinese Golden Ages, is organized by topic and written in a fairly academic tone. It may be a bit long-winded for a casual audience, as it makes an effort to be detailed rather…
The Meat Racket by Christopher Leonard
Rating: 7.8/10. The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business by Christopher Leonard Book about the American meat production industry, focusing on Tyson Foods, a major player in the field. Since the Great Depression, the industry has seen significant consolidation and vertical integration, with Tyson emerging as a dominant yet relatively unknown player….
Deep Learning for Vision Systems by Mohamed Elgendy
Rating: 8.0/10. An introductory textbook on computer vision using deep learning, assuming no prior knowledge of deep learning; thus, the first half of the book covers the basic concepts of neural network architecture and training setups. The second half is more advanced, focusing specifically on computer vision, and covers topics such as vision CNN architectures,…
Driven: The Race to Create the Autonomous Car by Alex Davies
Rating: 7.7/10. Book covering the history of autonomous driving, starting from the earliest days with the DARPA Challenge in 2003, and continuing up to 2020. The story begins when DARPA, motivated by the 9/11 attacks, decides to invest heavily in autonomous robots for potential military use in conflict zones like Afghanistan. As a result, DARPA…
License to Travel by Patrick Bixby
Rating: 7.1/10. License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport by Patrick Bixby Book about the history of the passport from ancient times to the modern era and reflects on what the passport represents. The passport, although a modern concept, has a long history and carries significant symbolic meaning. It epitomizes the control an…
The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen
Rating: 8.3/10. The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects by Andrew Chen Book about the dynamics of network effects and offers guidance for founders who are building products that depend on these effects for success. The author previously worked at Uber during a phase of explosive growth where he witnessed firsthand…
Pyomo – Optimization Modeling in Python by Bynum and others
Rating: 8.2/10. Book giving an overview of the Pyomo optimization framework, which doesn’t solve optimization problems itself but allows users to formulate them in a high-level, object-oriented format. Pyomo acts as an interface with solvers like CPLEX. The book talks about into numerous features of Pyomo but mostly stays clear of the solver algorithms’ internals,…
High-Performance Web Apps with FastAPI by Malhar Lathkar
Rating: 7.6/10. Book that explores the main features of the FastAPI web framework; it’s not super in-depth but covers the main use cases and components in fair detail. Chapter 1. FastAPI offers a number of improvements over other Python frameworks. First, it has type hints that allow the IDE to detect type errors. Next is…
Independent People by Halldor Laxness
Rating: 7.8/10. Work of Icelandic literature that won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955, the novel focuses on a farmer named Bjartur and his quest for “independence,” which he defines as being free from debts and obligations to anyone else. The novel describes Bjartur’s life as a sheep farmer in the harsh Icelandic landscape,…
High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik
Rating: 8.5/10. Book covering all aspects of networking and is useful for both front-end and back-end developers; it’s written at a level that doesn’t assume much prior networking knowledge, providing a higher-level overview of various protocols like TCP, HTTP, and WebSocket. It offers practical advice on what these protocol details imply for applications and how…
The Effective Hiring Manager by Mark Horstman
Rating: 7.2/10. Book on hiring, from screening resumes, interviews, and offer. It mostly focuses mostly on on behavioral interviews, which are the only type that is applicable to any job, so I’m a bit disappointed because it doesn’t offer any specific details on other types of interviews or data to back up its claims, especially…